:: The Park Paradigm ::

Markets for the Digital Generation

“CME to Launch Futures and Options on U.S. Nonfarm Payrolls”

According to a release from CME Group, the new contracts “will allow customers to directly manage their exposure to the government labor number or to offset positions in financial markets.”

The monthly U.S. nonfarm payrolls report is one of the most influential economic indicators globally as it is based on a survey of 375,000 businesses conducted by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that is usually released on the first Friday of each month.

“The Nonfarm Payroll report is typically the first major economic release of each month and speaks to the condition of employment from the prior month. It is closely followed as a way to gauge how the Federal Open Market Committee perceives economic growth,” the release said.

“There is a strong correlation between the nonfarm payroll report and CME Group financial futures contracts as well as other financial instruments,” said Rick Redding, CME Group’s managing director of products and services.

“Listed futures and options on futures on the nonfarm payroll are a transparent, straightforward and accessible way for our customers to offset unexpected financial market moves that often occur when this number comes out,” Redding added.

On the one hand, I can only applaud this initiative and I will watch with interest to see how successful these contracts become (in terms of volumes and liquidity.) Of course, on the other hand, it begs the question once more as to the logic of US anti-gambling laws and the resulting discrimination against a number of non-US players who could ostensibly compete in offering betting markets in economic outcomes.

Yes betting. The new CME contracts will allow people to bet on the monthly US nonfarm payroll number. Shocking I know… The optimist in me wants to believe that new contracts like these will further expose the latent hypocrisy implicit in the relevant US regulatory and legislative regimes and will ultimately lead to a more lucid and robust rewriting of these over the next several years. The pessimist in me fears that the growing power of the CME, combined with a knee-jerk reaction to anything vaguely associated with (financial) innovation due to the current market crisis, will mean any market innovation will need the explicit or implicit support of the boys in Chicago.

Of course in the world of financial exchanges, the investment banks just may have the lobbying power to face down the CME - their ‘consortium-backed’ futures exchange projects (see here and here) will be interesting to watch. On paper they should have no problem creating (a) compelling alternative(s) to the global oligopoly in listed futures and options; but getting a dozen bulge-bracket investment banks to work together is devilishly tough in the best of times. Like herding cats. In times like these, well we’ll just have to see… Of course a truly level playing field would open the flood-gates in terms of innovation (in technology, business models) and create enormous value for the ultimate consumers of financial exchanges (which is to say, any one with a savings or pension entitlement.) I would love to see this happen and despite the power of the entrenched status quo, I remain optimistic that we will see the levy break in the next few years. I’m sure AT&T seemed just as unassailable (as the CME does now), prior to telecoms deregulation.

In the world of futures and derivatives exchanges, I suspect the vector for regulatory-driven change lies in separating trading from clearing and settlement. It is this vertical integration - most famously practised by the CME and Eurex on each side of the Atlantic respectively - that is the greatest barrier to disruptive and innovative competition in this marketplace. By tying trading of the instruments they list to their own central clearing house, the exchanges create a ‘walled-garden’, locking in their customers. What the world needs is an open architecture - such that any market participant could chose both where to trade and where and how to clear. Indeed, Craig Donahue recently lambasted the investment banks for having continuously resisted clearing derivatives via a central counterparty:

“These problems exist in large part because investment banks traditionally have resisted a more centralised, transparent execution system for these products, preferring to maintain their dealer franchises and proprietary trading profits,” he said. “And they have tended to oppose central counterparty clearing services in these markets, worried that a mutualised risk structure will dissipate their credit and balance sheet advantages.”

While I have much sympathy for this view - he is correct in saying investment banks actively resist any moves to clear OTC derivatives via central counterparty fearing the effect of greater transparency on their margins - the catalyst for his outburst was a DoJ suggestion that the clearing and trading activities of the CME should be separated. A view for which I also have much sympathy. The alternative is to force big clearing houses to open up their platforms, much as telecom and utility regulators have forced the historical monopoly providers to open their infrastructures to competitors.

Disclosure: I have been trading a number of the large publicly listed exchanges (including both the CME and Eurex’s parent Deutsche Borse) from the short side over the last few months (although I closed out all my positions this morning after the big sell-off, but will be looking for opportunities to reset these short positions in the weeks and months ahead.) Unless…

Unless one of these big exchanges can actually kill the sacred cows and grasp the transformational opportunity on offer (before some or some number of upstarts beats them to it.) The thing is, the ‘incumbents’ have many significant advantages. Of course this is generally true in any industry, but it is especially true for exchanges: liquidity is the sine qua non of a successful exchange and for any new entrant, acquiring sufficient liquidity is a daunting (but not impossible) challenge. So the real question (if you are running an exchange) becomes: is it better to hide behind and valiantly defend these protecting barriers or do you leverage your intrinsic advantages, embrace change and re-invent your business model for a digital world?

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that I would favour the latter option, and indeed have a number of ideas as to how one might go about executing such a transformation successfully. All (or most) of which I guess would be anathema to the traditional exchange “seat holders” and admittedly might be very hard for a publicly listed company to effect (short term pain for long term gain.) It is ironic (given their relatively recent emergence as public companies for many) that perhaps the only viable way to transform an ‘incumbent’ exchange would be under private ownership…now I just need the valuations to come down a bit more and then pick a target! (Of course there would also be the small matter of finding a few billion of capital to finance the purchase…)

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The march of consolidation in the financial exchange sector continues unabated, with the CME’s bid for NYMEX just the latest (and almost certainly not the last) in a long line of deals that started in earnest a couple of years ago. (Hmmm…not long after AmazonBay hit the scene…) With a valuation of $11bn being bandied about, the smart folks over at General Atlantic (a firm I admire very much and whose many investments in the financial services space indicate a vision that will be familiar to readers of this blog) must be yet again chilling the bubbly. Recall they bought a 10% stake in NYMEX just 2 short years ago at a valuation of $1.6bn. Great trade.

But while the exchanges become fewer and bigger (like the banks and insurance companies before them), do they necessarily get better? Some elements of their business clearly lend themselves to economies of scale, but at what point to these come at the expense of dis-economies of complexity and bureaucracy? (Not to mention anti-competitive concerns…) But very few CEO’s or Board’s are predisposed to cellular division, a path of inexorable growth and consolidation is the default strategy in most industries. Which of course leaves lots and lots of room for innovative and unencumbered entreprises to bubble up in the shadows of these giants. Not such a bad state of affairs.

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I’m about as far away from being knowledgeable about horse racing (and betting on horse racing) as you can get, so I might have this all wrong, but it would seem to me that their are remarkable similarities between the “starting price” (for a horse race) and a “fixing (price)” on an exchange. (Previous thoughts on gambling v. trading here.)

Historically, starting prices (for UK horse racing) were set by the big bookmakers and as was pointed out in the June 2004 BBC programme “Battle of the Bookies”, these were routinely subject to manipulation by the big high street betting shops; with a relatively small stake (in comparison to the total amounts staked in their shops) they could move the on-course prices used to determine the starting price, generally shortening the odds of the favorite(s). The programme pointed out that with the advent of Betfair, this was getting harder and harder to do as arbitrageurs popped up to trade the price discrepancy between what was available “on-course” at the prices trading on the exchange.

Indeed if you look at fixings on financial markets, these are highly regulated by the exchanges and regulatory authorities to eliminate and prohibit this kind of artificial price setting. (See for example the rules of the London Stock Exchange.)

Indeed, the starting price is nothing more than the strike against which the bookmaker sells his outcome options on the race. The closer the starting price is to the “true price” (all outcomes add up to a 100% probability), the lower the margin for the options writers. As is the case in financial markets as well, the “OTC” (over-the-counter) providers of derivatives are often loathe to see prices migrate to a (commoditized) exchange environment as the usual result is significant margin compression as prices become transparent. The parallels aren’t perfect but in this context it doesn’t surprise me that the traditional “dealers” (read: bookies) aren’t very happy with Betfair’s plans to publish its own starting price:

In early November 2007 it was reported that Betfair was set to make a big announcement regarding the publication of its own SPs. On 13 November 2007 The Guardian reported;

“Betfair has spent two years developing a robust system to allow bets to be placed at its own SP. As a result, three extra columns will soon be added to its display for every win market on its British and Irish racing service: one for bets on a horse at the Betfair SP, one for “lay” bets against it at SP, and a “guide” price in the middle showing what the SP is likely to be…..SP bets will have some differences from “normal” bets on Betfair. Whereas normal bets can be cancelled until the moment when a rival gambler accepts the other side of the bet, SP bets cannot be cancelled once placed. Punters can, however, specify a minimum price at which they are willing to back, and a maximum price for lay bets.”

In the table below we look at the November Handicap run at Doncaster on November 10 2007, and compare the official SP with the “Betfair SP”. The horses are listed in market order and not order of finish.

The first thing to note is that the SP over-round on Betfair, including commission, totalled 108.5 against an official SP over-round of 127.9.

Of course if your business model (as a bookie) requires a 20%+ gross margin, things could get a bit tough…The question then becomes one of (a) can I continue to innovate and go “up-market” (more complex products - ie exotic derivatives) to preserve margins and/or (b) can I make my (”flow”) operations more efficient so that I can profit from much thinner margins (but probably) higher volumes? I suspect the answer to both questions is potentially yes but requires a fundamental reappraisal of one’s business model: a new paradigm. Unfortunately something that successful incumbents (and their managers) in every industry often find extremely challenging if not impossible to do.

(It also raises the question as to whether the distinction made between businesses subject to regulation by the Gambling Commission and the FSA is more a question of semantics than anything else. Merger anyone?)

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In 1971 Intel unveiled the world’s first commercial microprocessor, a technological revolution that heralded the Age of Information and Telecommunications - the fifth techno-economic paradigm since the dawn of the industrial revolution in the 18th century.* Although it is almost impossible to identify the core elements of each successive technological revolution without the distance of historical perspective, I wonder if Betfair’s recently announced Flywheel trading engine might be an analogous revolution at the dawn of the sixth paradigm - the Age of Markets. Will Moore’s Law be joined by Yu’s Law? (or Devine’s Law?):

“The number of transactions per second per $1000 of hardware increases by X every Y months…(!)”

(Remember future wikipedia contributors, you read it here first! )

To put this into context, and using Carlota Perez’ framework, let me outline some of the elements I believe will characterize the Age of Markets. Firstly, new technologies and new or redefined industries will emerge:

• truly global financial markets (including ‘developing’ countries)
• entirely new concept of risk management and insurance: “outcome” markets
• convergence of retail and wholesale risk markets
• ubiquitous worldwide realtime trading in “digital goods and services”

These will be supported by new or redefined infrastructures:

• cheap electronic exchange software
• digital transaction costs converging on free
• abundant (almost free) computing power and communication bandwidth
• worldwide dissemination of mobile networked computers (phones)
• vast social networks (breaking institutional monopoly on trust)

Indeed, unleashing the potential for ubiquitous traded markets in heretofore “inaccessible” products, services and outcomes depends on a number of foundation elements: essentially free transaction mechanisms (allowing high frequency, low value transactions), vast distributed digital communication platforms, robust and secure trust frameworks, and intuitive (ideally invisible, at least in the conscious sense) and painless trade capture and risk management interfaces. It would seem that Flywheel has the potential to meet at least the first of these requirements (from BusinessWeek):

Betfair CEO David Yu set the company’s R&D team the task of increasing throughput by 100 times for free. Project 100X took two years to develop and was run both internally and with three other partners, in what Carter calls a “bake out” - whichever team came up with the best prototype would get the investment for the rollout.

The budget for the entire project was less than £1m over two years.

In the end, the R&D team came up with a betting engine, called Flywheel, that could demonstrate a throughput of almost 100,000 transactions per second, while also reducing the cost per transaction by 200 times.

Even with a traditional betting engine, Betfair processes five million transactions per day - much more than the London Stock Exchange’s transaction processing system is capable of.

The R&D team expects one million trades per second to be possible through Flywheel, which it estimates is the equivalent of the entire combined annual global equity trading volume being processed in a matter of hours.

However, for Carter, the key achievement is the cost levels. He explained the whole system runs on two servers with an approximate cost of £25,000. This, he said, is in comparison to a high street bank with a similar throughput load that will typically use a mainframe costing many millions of pounds.

Ok, just in case you skimmed over that last bit, it probably bears repeating:

ONE MILLION TRADES PER SECOND. ON £25,ooo OF HARDWARE.

I’m talking my own book sure, but honestly who’s stock would you rather own? The NYSE Euronext? Nasdaq? how about Deutsche Borse? or OMX? or the LSE? …or Betfair???

In Amazonbay, I suggested that someone like eBay might move into financial markets, leveraging their technology and associated low transaction costs by buying a financial exchange, leading electronic agency brokers and ultimately Betfair (in the summer of 2010!) With a market capitalization of c. $44bn eBay could probably afford NYSE Euronext (at c. $21bn plus a takeover premium) but the real prize would be Betfair. By 2010 they should still be able to afford it but it’s far from clear it will be for sale and one imagines it will be a far sight more expensive than the £1.5bn valuation Softbank acheived when it took a private stake in April 2006. Speculating about big brand name corporate deals is obviously fun but risks confusing the real point.

Any business predicated on charging a significant ‘metered’ transaction fee for matching or facilitating a (digital) trade is likely to see it’s business model washed away like a sand castle at high tide and needs to be ready to compete in a world where marginal transaction costs are zero and value is derived ‘because of’ the trade, not ‘with’ the trade.

Oh, and one more thing… ONE MILLION TRADES PER SECOND. MILLION.

…this is not your father’s oldsmobile…

(* see Technological Revolutions and Financial Capital, p. 11)

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I had the great pleasure of meeting Eleni in Arusha last June and was happy to see that her presentation on the commodity exchange she is building in Ethiopia is now up on TedTalks for all to see. Very exciting stuff. I look forward to catching up with her soon. Maybe she’ll even let me invest!

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Today I’m at the inaugural Exchange Invest Conference Monaco organized by Patrick Young and supported by HSH Prince Albert II. Patrick’s idea was to bring together a variety of different people involved in the rapidly changing world of financial exchanges in order to discuss, debate and better understand the forces driving these changes.

The opening speaker was Rene Karsenti, CEO of ICMA who spoke generally about the challenges currently facing global financial markets, followed by a presentation by the Monaco International Chamber of Commerce highlighting the state of the local financial sector.

I gave a short-ish presentation (longer than I was prepared for - apologies to the audience for my rambling - but needed to ad lib as the a/v guys debugged the flashplayer) on the context behind AmazonBay, after which when the a/v was working, we showed the film.

Next on the agenda was Eric Bettelheim who, to set the scene for a discussion on the “Future of Environmental Finance”, gave us a presentation on the impact of our modern civilization on the Earth’s biosphere. After going quickly through the science, he highlighted the increasing financial relevance of the developing carbon markets on industrial companies and economies, and the opportunity that creates for financial markets. He asserts that climate stabilisation by mid-century is impossible without forest carbon credits, and says the best (lowest cost) way to do this is via forestation projects in developing countries. Next he went on to articulate the growing risk of insufficient fresh water supplies to the global economy and predicts that water trading will be the ‘next big thing’ (after carbon) and gave various examples of new environmental markets such as biodiversity markets. It’s great to see and hear about voluntary markets emerging in areas that would not have historically been conceived as ‘tradeable’: yet another indication that we are entering the age of markets?

With the stage set, Steve Zwick moderated the panel discussion on the future of environmental finance. Patrick Birley (CEO of the European Climate Exchange) flagged that the dramatic market growth in Europe is very much due to the mandatory nature of CO2 reductions in the EU and expects that if (when) this happens in the US it will create another strong growth driver. Eric felt that the US would be able to take advantage of not having signed Kyoto, by now developing a better, more robust market mechanism having learned the lessons from the mistakes of others. A key topic was the discussion of ‘voluntary’ vs ‘mandatory’ carbon reduction markets and the myriad of different and often conflicting or contradictory standards. Gareth Hughes (Climate Change Capital) pointed out that voluntary markets were very useful is providing test beds for new and innovative ideas and experimentation. This led to a discussion on standards - how they should be set and by whom - where Eric pointed out that there will likely be multiple standards and competition should be allowed to operate to determine what are the ‘best’ standards, but emphasized that standards need to be commercial viable (which is not the case necessarily for Kyoto/EU credits which are bureaucratically nightmarish. Furthermore the compliance periods (5 years) are too short and create a structural mismatch between the projects that will effectively mitigate carbon emissions and the permit regime. He suggested that the future of carbon markets may well look similar to oil markets today with multiple grades and different contracts.

I questioned the approach whereby governments gave allotments to industry (rather than selling them - via auction or otherwise) and suggested that this was a fundamental handicap to developing efficient and working markets; I suggested that in this context emission permits were akin to spectrum licences - it seems odd to me that the energy companies (and other major industrial polluters) are too fragile to pay for their way while telecom companies were given no such indulgence when it came to buying 3G licences.

*******

Michael Mainelli kicked off the afternoon session with a presentation looking at competition between financial centres and what are the elements that underpin a strong and successful financial centre, and described the methodology behind the Global Financial Centres Index that his firm, in co-operation with the City of London, has developed. This led in to a panel, moderated by Michael, looking at new markets and products. Lamon Rutten (CEO of MCX of India) pointed out that exchanges should seek out opportunities where they can identify manifest market inefficiencies and benefit by removing or mitigating these inefficiencies. Colin Howard then described the key success factors for “micro-exchanges”: all trading is dematerialized, no/low regulation, integrated administration. Liquidity is low on micro-exchanges and so the running costs typically cannot be paid for out of transaction costs. Mike Chadney (CEO of CityOdds) gave a very good explanation of the convergence of betting, insurance and derivatives (he’s obviously been indoctrinated by the Park Paradigm! )

Next up was Robert Barnes (MD, UBS) with a snappy presentation entititled “Dark liquidity and the changing trading environment” (some of my ramblings on the subject from last year are here). He highlighted that as transaction numbers explode, rising transaction costs are becoming a significant drag on further growth of on-exchange trading. Also, as (MiFID driven) competition leads to increased competition and higher complexity, smart order routing will pool liquidity ‘puddles’ and accessing dark liquidity (defined as firm orders that are neither executed nor disclosed) pools will be key.

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As reported in the NY Daily News:

Tennis is one of the fastest growing areas of Betfair’s sprawling business, which encompasses some five million bets a day. In July, for instance, the London Stock Exchange handled 12 million transactions; the same month Betfair handled 75 million. A record $60 million was wagered on this year’s Wimbledon final between Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal, according to Marks.

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“Buy, buy, buy” is how the Economist headlined its timely briefing on financial exchanges this week:

TRADERS cannot resist a bet, even on their own fate. Amid a bidding war over Chicago’s derivatives exchanges, the US Futures Exchange, also based in the Windy City, has launched a “binary” contract which allows speculators to take a punt on whether the IntercontinentalExchange (ICE) can snatch the Chicago Board of Trade, America’s oldest derivatives exchange, from the grasp of the biggest, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (CME). Until recently ICE, a fast-growing electronic upstart from Atlanta, had the edge. Then the CME upped its offer to $9.8 billion and its chances of success—as measured by the binary contracts—leapt to over 70%.

(But of course, trading on binaries based on the outcome of a possible merger battle is NOT gambling. And of course it is unlikely anyone is doing it in their BATHROBE…so Rep Frank Wolf needn’t worry…)

I’m going to keep this short and sweet - I wonder if today’s existing (and/or planned) mega-exchanges don’t resemble the giant incumbent telecom companies c. 1998?

(…and of course I’m not just talking about the share price…and are Reg NMS and Mifid analogous to the Telecoms Act of 1996?)

History never repeats itself - exactly - but if I’m right, there are fortunes to be made and lost over the next decade in this arena, and - more importantly - I’d suggest they aren’t the ones most people are currently discounting.

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(From Fortune:)

Leo Melamed, godfather of the Chicago mercantile exchange, changed investing forever with financial derivatives. Here’s what this market visionary thinks is next.

Way back in 1972, the head of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange had a crazy idea: If you could trade futures on pork bellies, wheat and beef, Leo Melamed wondered, why not on Swiss francs or deutsche marks? Or any other financial instrument for that matter? That notion has radically changed the way market risk is managed.

Way back in 2000, Andrew Black and Ed Wray had a crazy idea: If you could trade derivatives on financial instruments, why not on the outcomes of horse racing or soccer? or any other sport for that matter?

Here in 2007 (and for the past 2-3 years), I’ve been thinking about what I call particle finance, as analagous to particle physics. I firmly believe that advances in information and communication technology will allow us to reduce financial (and more broadly speaking) risk management to its smallest and most fundamental component parts. We are on the verge of discovering and being able to manipulate the quarks of the risk management universe. The ramifications (if my thesis is correct) are enormous and potentially highly disruptive.

In many instances progress will be hampered by powerful incumbents protecting the status quo via regulatory and legislative barriers. But ultimately I don’t think you can keep the genie in the bottle; the US in particular runs the risk of losing it’s pre-eminent position as an innovator in financial services and risk management unless they succeed in reforming their often parochial and restrictive regulatory environment. This in fact was the conclusion of Mayor Bloomberg and Senator Schumer in their recent report on the future prospects of New York as a global financial center:

The joint report stipulated that while many of the causes are due to improved markets abroad and sophisticated technology that has virtually eliminated barriers to the flow of capital, a significant number of the causes for America’s declining competitiveness are self-imposed. For instance, U.S.-based financial services firms are now unable to attract and retain many of the highly-skilled professionals they need because of caps on the number of visas available under U.S. immigration rules. A greater perceived litigation risk has also reduced the appeal of the U.S. market to many foreign firms. Finally, a complex and sometimes unresponsive regulatory framework has not only prompted many foreign firms to stay out of the U.S. markets, but also is forcing more business overseas because of the complexity and cost of doing business in U.S. financial markets regardless of where they are located. The joint report offered several recommendations, derived from detailed analyses of market conditions here and abroad, informed by interviews with more than 50 respected leaders drawn from the financial services industry, consumer groups, and other stakeholders. The recommendations focus on near-term administrative actions that can signal renewed U.S. focus on competitiveness, actions to level the playing field for both domestic and foreign companies doing business in the United States, and longer-term initiatives to address more complex policy, legal, regulatory and other structural issues affecting the U.S. position as the world’s leading financial center.

Their recommendations are straightforward and would indeed have a powerful liberating effect on American financial and risk markets, to the benefit not only of American individuals and corporations but also globally given both the size and depth of US markets and the proven American ability to marshall innovation (when allowed to do so - it is not a coincidence that the US is starting to fall behind in telecoms and financial services as these happen to be two of the most protected and regulated industries…), let’s hope they gain the grass-roots political traction they deserve and don’t get hacked into irrelevance by the dinosaur brigade:

Recommendations to sustain the nation’s and New York’s global financial services leadership:

Provide clearer guidance for implementing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act;

Implement securities litigation reform with particular short-term emphasis on leveraging the SEC’s existing authority;

Develop a common vision and a supporting set of shared regulatory principles;

Ease immigration restrictions facing skilled non-US professional workers;

Recognize IFRS without reconciliation for listing purposes and promote convergence of accounting and auditing standards;

Protect US global competitiveness in implementing the Basel II Capital Accord;

Form an independent, bipartisan National Commission on Financial Market Competitiveness to resolve long-term structural issues;

Modernize financial services charters and holding company structures;

Establish a public/private partnership to promote New York’s local agenda by acting as the high-level liaison between individual industry participants and the city, as well as by driving forward the partnership’s broader strategic plan for New York’s financial services development.

More actively managing attraction and retention for financial services;

Establishing a world-class Center for Applied Global Finance, and

Potentially creating a special international financial services zone.

Anyhow, to come back to the original point - Leo Melamed and the CME should indeed be celebrated for their role in bringing financial derivatives to life and developing and extremely important and robust set of markets that are now part of the very fabric of our global economy. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I would love to be able to look back in 20 years on a legacy analogous to Mr. Melamed’s; as one of the people who were instrumental in bringing the benefits of particle finance - of ubiquitous and super-efficient risk management and risk transfer - to a global audience. I’ve often been thought crazy (by my managers or colleagues) but apparently I’m in good company here:

(Leo Melamed describing how he came upon the idea of financial futures) And then, finally, I came to the thought that Bretton Woods, the fixed-exchange-rate system, was coming apart. And when it finally comes apart, wouldn’t there be a need for foreign-exchange futures? Our board thought I was crazy, and very frankly I thought it was a little crazy too, because why hadn’t anybody else done this? I went to Milton Friedman, though, and he absolutely embraced the idea.

Well I don’t have Mr. Friedman but I was a syndicate manager and so I guess my challenge over the coming years will be to successfully syndicate my ideas. I’m still thinking about what the right structure might be…but good ideas, like good bonds, tend to sell themselves (but a good story always helps to get the ball rolling!)

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BBC NEWS | Business | Chicago exchanges in $8bn merger

Will be interesting to see how this plays out, especially in terms of trading and clearing costs and volumes.

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